Tech Leaders on Bitcoin, AI, and the New Global Power Shift w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #172
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The experts, you speak to everybody in the street, they're expecting that we're about to see a bull run. We've been waiting for a long time for Bitcoin to peel off the tracking of the Dow and the financial markets. And I think this is finally the breaking point.

Today, Amazon announced we are partnering with Humane, Saudi Arabia's newly created AI innovation company. NVIDIA is selling 18,000 of its top GB300 Blackwell AI chips to Saudi Arabia. The freedom to just sit back and act, having infinite or near infinite capital and instant decision making is a pretty powerful thing. I think that the macro level, the combination of U.S. innovation and capital coming from the Middle East,

makes it kind of unbeatable with the future of us. The safest bet by far is to run like hell toward your targets. You'll be very glad you didn't waste a millisecond between now and 2030. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and a WTF Just Happened in Tech episode with my Moonshot mates, Salim Ismail, the CEO of OpenEXO, and my longtime best friend and fraternity brother, the head of LinkXPV, Dave Blunden.

two of the most extraordinary individuals and we're here to deliver you the real news that happened this past week uh that really the only news that matters in technology that's changing our lives you give us a couple hours we'll tell you what just transformed

Salim, Dave, welcome to Moonshots. Good to be here. Good to be here. Thanks, Peter. Yeah. So, you know, Salim, every episode, it's like, where's Waldo? You know, you are a traveling probability function around the planet. So where have you just come back from? I just came back from Palermo, California.

with a canceled flight in Barcelona, a day and a half to get back. But it was nice to be back and nice to be there. You know, there's this thing called Zoom where you can actually go there digitally and dematerialize yourself. You know, this is an important point. We thought when video conferencing came out in the 90s, it would kill the conference business, right? Because you could get all the content online. And as we've evolved digitally, we go to more conferences than ever because we value that human presence, right?

And you and I both would kill not to have to travel ridiculous distances to speak to groups, but we end up having to do more and more of it. I don't know. I feel like this podcast has a lot more reach than whatever you're doing on those trips. Yeah, it has way more reach. But the problem is that the demand is still like the people kind of go. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they want you. I know that. I know.

I've got even a crazier one. I did this TEDx talk a few years ago called Fixing Civilization. And I got called by a company and said, we'd like you to come and do that talk, exactly the same talk. I said, well, why don't you just play the YouTube video? They're like, no, we really want you. I get there and get to the venue. And it's literally a TV studio with cameras. They're broadcasting to their offices. They literally could have just played the TV. And I was like, this is insane. So that part I don't understand. But okay, fine.

We'll go with that because it can't be understood. Well, Peter, you shouldn't bug Salim too much. I saw you in New York this week. You're back in L.A. now. You're going to San Fran and then off to Hong Kong. Yeah, you know, I was supposed to be going to Florida tomorrow and the meeting got canceled. And I was like, yay, I'm so happy. Yeah, pot calling the kettle black. Yeah, well, hey. By the way, congratulations on New York on Monday. Another very successful XPRIZE voyage.

But that was just epic. I mean, the way you inspired that crowd is just, it was really something to see. Thank you. We'll talk about that. We just gave out 12 million of the 111 million in our HealthSpan prize, helping people live an extra 20 healthy years. Salim, you know, it's your birthday coming up this weekend, I think. Isn't that true?

I turned 60 in 48 hours. Amazing. Amazing. 60 down, you know, 180 to go. Exactly. All right. Well, let's get into this week. A lot of news, a lot happening in the exponential world, in the moonshot world. And my moonshot mates are here to help me tell the story. Let's begin. Let's start with Bitcoin. A lot of motion. And for those of us who are huge Bitcoin believers, I think all three of us,

We're back into the 100K plus zone. So welcome back, everybody. And I think we're poised for new heights. This is interesting. So Mike Saylor, who I look forward to having back on the podcast soon, has doubled his Bitcoin purchasing plan. Dave, Salim, you want to lay this out for the team? Sure.

Yeah, well, you know, nothing slows down Mike. He's going to stay aggressive, doubling down. $21.21 is $21 billion of equity, $21 billion of debt. That's a lot.

And $42.42, I think, Salim, you calculated the fraction of all Bitcoin that that implies. It's a pretty material fraction that he would need to buy. It's a big number, and he's making a massive bet, and the bet seems to be paying off. If you're a macro believer in the future of Bitcoin, then the way he's engineering this is about as amazing as you could imagine. Yeah, Peter, you mentioned last time that there's a pretty big ARB spread between the price of Bitcoin and the price of MicroStrategy stock, a little less than 2x today.

difference there. On the other hand, MicroStrategy is levered two to one because of the debt component. So if you're a believer, it's actually a levered way to invest, which I think is why it's attracting a lot of people. Why don't I just go buy a Bitcoin? Well, if you buy a MicroStrategy share, you're levered on the upside.

But the people buying the debt are predominantly hedge funds that are buying the debt and then shorting the stock concurrently. So they're making money either way, and that's why there's zero interest on the debt. But the one thing I love about what Mike's done in 2121 and also 4242 is he's gotten rid of all the interest payments. So there's no real existential threat to MicroStrategy anymore. When he borrowed the money originally, he was financing the debt from the cash flow of their core software company.

which had scale limits because he can only pay so much interest. Now on his new design, it's infinitely scalable because there's no interest payments. So it's

Pretty brilliant. And Mike's making a call to the world, to all corporations, both private and public, to go on the Bitcoin standard. And of course, the more companies he gets to buy Bitcoin, you know, the shorter the supply of Bitcoin, the higher the price goes, the more his plan works. I mean, you know, this plan of $42 billion of stock sale and $42 billion of debt. So what is that? $84 billion worth of Bitcoin being purchased worldwide.

That's that's massive. And of course, he's pushing as well the sovereign Bitcoin reserves all of this You know There's only 21 million Bitcoin and we discussed this in the last episode or a couple episodes ago That if all the millionaires in the world Wanted to buy some Bitcoin. It's they get access to like a fraction of a Bitcoin and

you know he's not enough to go around and the float is relatively low yeah when we were talking to mike in uh in miami a couple months ago peter the one thing that he opened my eyes to is you know we're talking about sovereign wealth funds and sovereign you know uh treasuries putting a fraction of their money into bitcoin uh when you looked at the pie chart

As a fraction of global wealth, it's this tiny, tiny, tiny little slice, all Bitcoin combined. And so he doesn't need every country in the world to move its treasury to Bitcoin. He needs like 1% of the countries in the world to move 0.1% of their treasuries. And that would absorb all the Bitcoin in the world. And drive it to, you know, he's predicting prices higher.

you know, way north of a million, north of 10 million per Bitcoin. The number we ran was if 1% of the Fortune 1000 put 1% of their treasury in Bitcoin, that would drive it to a million dollars of Bitcoin. Which seems more and more likely. You know, it's so funny. I've been buying Bitcoin along the way. And every time I sweep some capital in from stock,

sale of a stock or some deal I did, I'm like, okay, I'm putting into Bitcoin. I am putting a certain percentage in MicroStrategy as well. This is not investment advice. It's just what I'm doing. And, you know, one of my financial team members said, hey, should we wait for it to dip? And I said, you can't do that. You can't play that game. You have to just buy

and hold and if it's 103 000 or 97 000 or goes up to 120 000 just buy it and hold it you can't try and guess the market because what you see over and over again is that the bitcoin price will jump like it did last week seven eight ten thousand dollars over the course of 24 hours and then it's flat for a long time if you miss those trading days by having selling in and out uh

then you've lost all the upside potential. I think there's something like 10 days in the year that Bitcoin does 70% of its upside. Yeah, crazy. So if you miss those 10 days, of course, which 10 days is the challenge?

Here's more news. This is from Brian Armstrong. Crypto is about to be in everyone's 401k. My goal is that five to 10 years getting into coin 50 index will feel as good as this. This is a quote from Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, who will also be on this podcast soon enough. Coinbase joined the S&P 500 days after Bitcoin soared past $100,000. Salim, what are your thoughts here?

Finally, getting legitimacy. I don't think there's any turning back. I think the macro world and the money world will be forced to kind of start to address this. I was talking to one of the top wealth management folks in a particular country, and they won't let their advisors recommend Bitcoin.

It's crazy. And the advisor going nuts because their clients coming to them going, I want to buy Bitcoin. And the company won't let them because there was legal liability for them or legal risk as determined by their risk folks. So there's like a complete cluster F going on around what they're allowed to do. That pressure will slowly ease as we get more legitimacy into the space. And I think this is great, great news overall. And in the meantime, people buy micro strategies.

or other companies that are following suit. That's right. Yeah. Next time we circle up on Bitcoin, I'd love to talk more about the agent-to-agent AI economy. Oh, my God. And micropayments. For sure. Because putting Bitcoin into 401k, I've been working on that, thinking about that for years. It's clearly getting legitimacy now. But the new thing is the A2A payments and how that whole economy is going to evolve. And that's clearly going to require digital currency. You're not going to

transact dollars. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. That's what I pay attention to. Every week, I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you,

and it's available totally for free. Please join me. Subscribe at diamandis.com slash subscribe. That's diamandis.com slash subscribe. All right, let's go back to the episode. David Bailey and BTC native holding company Nakamoto merge into kindly MD to establish a BTC treasury. Salim.

Well, this just speaks to the fact that, you know, Michael Saylor has been operating on a lone wolf basis. And now other people are going, wait a minute. Why is he getting all the upside and good to fun here? He's getting a huge chunk of the pie. We want in on this. And so I think there'll be start to see more and more of this. I think we'll see a flood of this type of announcement in the next six months as people go, we got to get into this.

And it'll be a self-fulfilling strategy because then it drives the price upward all the while. Dave, are you seeing this in any of your companies? I told you I green-lighted them all to do it. And I'm just waiting. The bellwether for me is when they call back and say, hey, Dave, is it still okay if we put part of our treasure into Bitcoin? I'm just waiting for that call. I'll let you know the minute it happens. Please do, because that is an inflection point that we're about to see a price spike.

I mean, when my mom says, you know, should I buy buying Bitcoin? But by the way, then her financial advisor says, you can't do it here. Then I say, hey, buy MicroStrategy instead. That's right. It's crazy. All right. Let's continue on here. This is another piece of that puzzle.

On this next slide here, corporate Bitcoin purchases now outweigh the supply of new Bitcoin by 3.3 in 2025. So, I mean, this is what you were speaking to. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's going to start to become mandatory for corporate treasuries. I look forward to the day that somebody will be deemed unworthy of that role if they don't put Bitcoin in the treasury. Fascinating. Yeah. I mean, this is basically saying, you know, we're mining Bitcoin at a certain rate.

And the availability of that new Bitcoin plus what's available for sale is being outstripped by demand. And that will drive the price through the roof for sure. It's really interesting to think about the original protocol document. I don't know if you ever read it. Years ago. Yeah. And it expands the supply pretty aggressively for a period of time and then it's capped.

And then it just trickles out with mining after that. And the amount of foresight in that design is just unbelievable. Everyone, it should be mandatory school to read that document. It really should be. This is one of the most prescient documents. And you know, we've talked about this before. There have been many attempts at creating a viable digital currency or store of value over the decades. And so lots of people waited for two, three years to see if Bitcoin would actually bite because all the others kind of fell apart after a year or two years.

And the damn thing held gamified it so perfectly. It's unbelievable. You know, here's a homework assignment for those listening who want to play in this. Go and download the original Bitcoin white paper, stick it into Google's notebook LM and just listen to a podcast about it or ask for, you know, an understandable two or three page summary. All right.

It is a beautiful work. And the most extraordinary thing about it is it's working. It's never been hacked. And it has become the dominant store of value. So the part that I find people struggle with the most is there's no central authority or point of control. It's a completely decentralized peer to peer participatory network.

And that I find people just cannot get their heads around. It's amazing. Yeah. All right. Here's just a chart to back it all up. You know, the experts, you speak to everybody in the street. They're expecting that we're about to see a bull run. BTC is signaling a comeback, reclaiming key one year MVRV momentum average. You know, I'm not someone who looks at the charts and studies the charts myself, but

But this seems to be self-evident. I think what's noteworthy here is we've been waiting for a long time for Bitcoin to peel off the tracking of the Dow and the financial markets. And I think this is finally the breaking point. And I hope this continues. And if it does, we're going to see a massive bull run if this is the point. From your mouth to the universe's digital ears.

Let's jump into our favorite subject here at Moonshots, AI. This is a huge week for AI. We're seeing a global power. Unlike last week, which was the hugest week. No, no, no. The point being that every week is like blowing apart the previous week. It's unreal. Yeah.

This is a global power grab in the AI universe, and it was centered not in Washington, D.C., not in Silicon Valley. This week, we were in Riyadh, where the tech CEOs from the U.S. joined President Trump to go and do a deep dive into a Saudi investment forum.

Yeah, this isn't even the full list. You have Jenny Johnson, who runs Franklin Templeton, is there. Larry Fink, who runs BlackRock, is there. I mean, this is ridiculous. And I knew Dubai has historically attracted that crowd recently. Now Riyadh is catching up.

Unbelievable amount of activity and investment. But boy, did they get the best of the best worldwide to show up this week. Amazing. You know, I'm on the board of the Future Investment Initiative, FII, which is under PIF, under the Public Investment Initiative.

a fund of Saudi Arabia and and I sort of sort of help address the AI agenda at FII every year in Saudi in October in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia wants to be number two to the US in the AI world and they're prepared to bring a huge amount of capital and relationships to the table. So

This was a massive success for the ministers and for the ruler of Saudi. Let's dive in a little bit further. This is a tweet from Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO. Today, Amazon announced, "We are partnering with Humane, Saudi Arabia's newly created AI innovation company, to collectively invest 5 billion and to build a groundbreaking AI zone in the kingdom."

Let's pair that with the next article here, which is NVIDIA is selling 18,000 of its top GB 300 Blackwell AI chips to Saudi Arabia. It's a $10 billion commitment by Jensen. Humane is owned by Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, working to develop AI models and data center infrastructure. This is a huge deal.

Dave, how do you think about this? Well, for starters, there's some great video coming out of the conference out there. A lot of it is public. So if you have a free minute after this podcast, you might want to look at David Sachs meeting with His Excellency Abdullah El-Sawah in particular. And we'll show a clip on that next. Oh, great. Great. Yeah, because they're basically taking a lot of the handcuffs off the chip exports within this region as part of this conference. And this is it right here.

That was kind of inevitable. But also, you know, Saudi's got big investments in Corweave and Cerebras. So they're working on their own infrastructure as well. Those are unrestricted. It's not really their own infrastructure, but unrestricted infrastructure. So this isn't the only thing going on.

But it's very consistent with a couple of things. The Liquid AI team was telling us that Arabic in particular has a thousand dialects. And none of the U.S. models, foundation models, are addressing that at all. So they really want to be able to control the regionalization of the technology.

And, you know, and also the cultural values. We've been talking about this a lot. You know, they having a culturally matching version of these AIs. Because what's going to happen next is anyone under the age of, say, 20 is going to spend a lot of time talking to their AI. Yeah. And so then a lot of what their worldview is comes back from whatever the AI is telling them.

And very, very important for various regions around the country to have some say in what it says and how it interacts with their next generation of kids. I mean, I think one of the most relevant things here is this places Saudi Arabia strictly in the U.S. court as opposed to China. The U.S., you know, they've teamed fully with U.S., U.S. infrastructure, U.S. partnerships, U.S. investments.

making a massive commitment into the US AI infrastructure. So that's huge. And

And Nvidia agreeing to give them 18,000 of its top Blackwell chips is massive. I mean, people, countries around the world are frothing to get access to that. So interestingly enough, right, we have both Saudi Arabia and the UAE making massive financial commitments to this. And what we saw about a decade ago was these two nations making massive commitments to new energy and environmental investments.

And it's the advantage of being a nation ruled by a ruler who can say, OK, yay, verily, we're going there and not having to deal with a full Congress and Senate and democracy. But their ability to pivot so rapidly and say, listen, the most important thing in the world is AI. And we're committing a trillion dollars and it will be multiple trillions into AI.

is a massive advantage for them. Salim, you've had these conversations. It is. It is incredibly impressive to watch. And when you get a, you know, we often talk about governance models, and it's always clear that the best model is a benevolent dictator.

And the problem is in many cases, a dictator doesn't stay benevolent. But in these cases, they actually seem to be very much so. I've spent more time in the UAE, and the stories you hear about His Highness bin Zayed are unbelievable in terms of the character of the man.

Uh, and the, the sheer integrity that is coming through and then that cascades down all the way very quickly. So I'm, it's super impressive to watch and the fact that they're making these investments. I think that the macro level, the combination of us innovation and capital coming from the Middle East makes it kind of unbeatable what the future holds. Yeah, for sure. Let's take the next, uh, let's go to the next slide here. Um, and this is, uh, the minister Abdul Aswaha, uh,

is having a conversation with David Sachs. I'm going to play this video in a moment. Abdul Oswaha is the minister covering space and com and technology. He's a beautiful man. I call him a friend. I knew him back when he was at Cisco before the ruler of the kingdom tapped on him to come back

and join as a minister. And in fact, Dave, you and I hosted him in Venice in a makeshift Magilis, what, about a year ago? Venice, California, by the way. Yes, Venice, California. No, it was great. He's a brilliant guy. And he's close to Elon, close to all the tech CEOs. All right, let's play this interview between David Sachs and Minister Abdullah Swaha.

Technologies have helped us deliver a passport within five minutes. You said to me we're going to soon see that in other economies as well. How you could renew your license, how you could do all of your different digital services in a cashless society as well from the digital age and in the intelligent age. We've showed you firsthand how we're

Creating nanorobots with CRISPR technology, leveraging generative AI to tackle sickle cell disease, bad cholesterol, have targeted gene therapy, which is remarkable, reducing the cost to treat a patient from $2.2 million to just sub $100,000.

Think about the remarkable work that we're doing in agentic AI, helping Aramco energize the world, which we need to fuel the U.S. ambition and Saudi's ambition in AI training and inference, because we're going to converge not only to the price point of electronics, but it's really the price point of electrons. Amazing. I mean, we're seeing...

huge investments by the government across all exponential technology areas. Now, I think what's incredible is by virtue of their size and their technology base, they're outstripping other nations around the world. They don't come close to what we're doing in the United States, but they're focusing their capital and they're driving breakthroughs.

And they're moving quickly. I think in that video clip, if you have time to watch the full video, David Sachs has some brilliant things to say, as always. But you can sense, you know, they have complete freedom. They have tons of capital and complete freedom to act quickly in this AI environment. And you can feel that vibe just in that video clip. And David Sachs, he is within the constraints of, you know, congressional votes and wearing a suit and tie and his dress shoe. You can just feel that.

the difference in ability to be nimble. And I remember when I was a kid growing up, you know, mostly in Iran as a young child, and my mom would always tell us like, "U.S. foreign policy is going to be a disaster in this country." She learned the language, you know, she spoke Farsi, she really got integrated into the culture, which very few Americans in the country did at the time.

And she said the problem fundamentally is that Americans, every four years, we completely change our mind on what we're trying to achieve in this country. And there's no consistency whatsoever over time. And boy, did she turn out to be right about that. So you're right, Salim, and this kind of AI timeframe is so short.

And there's so much that needs to be done so quickly. The freedom to just sit back and act, you know, having infinite or near infinite capital and instant decision making is it's a pretty powerful thing. You know, every during the covid when we had to make decisions very quickly, every major democracy failed in navigating covid. Well, actually, every major country failed. All the small countries did very well.

So I think there's a hint there as to the future of governance as you go to a micro level. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rock star group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors.

focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That's exponentialmastery.com. Dave, you said something that's really important. Second, I just want to point it out.

Speed here. We're gonna see the AI I don't call it AI wars AI dominance play out over the next two to three years two to four years At which point it's honestly it's game over but who's on top and who's second and third is unlikely to change after that so what we're seeing is really a jockeying for position and

between major nations, in particular China, the Emirates, Saudi. Qatar will play in there as well. I don't think Russia is going to be relevant unless they team up with China in some fashion. And then it's whoever is leading the game is going to make the rules. I mean, do you agree with that? Can I offer a counterpoint?

If I give the counterpoint side, the speed of democratization is such that even if one kind of pairing of partners goes ahead of the other, that it'll level off very quickly after that. And we've seen that over the last couple of years. You've opened AI and then you've got Gemini and then you've got DeepSeek and that gets overtaken. I think it's going to democratize much faster than the past.

and therefore you won't see one taking off in a winner take all type of opera that's my view i think it's a safer view if that's the case but i think we're and we'll have a conversation on this in a few minutes where ai is beginning to self-code

And we have the potential for a runaway digital superintelligence race with whoever's on top. Dave, how do you think about that? Well, Peter, your first statement was so right. And you can't overstate the winner-take-all effects that are going on.

There isn't currently a force to democratize any of this, and it would take an amazingly huge amount of inertia very quickly to democratize all of this. The forces of concentration of everything are just unbelievable because of that self-improvement effect that Peter just mentioned. And so, you know, I'm telling everybody around here, everyone around MIT, everyone around Harvard, everyone around my kids, like you have a window of opportunity that's exactly the timeline Peter laid out of about four years of

to set the course of your entire life. Nobody knows what's going to happen after that, but the forces of concentration are much stronger than the forces of distribution. So the safest bet by far is to run like hell toward your targets. And in the event that something happens that spreads out all the value, you're fine.

But in the other event where it's all concentrated, you'll be very glad you didn't waste a millisecond between now and 2030. I think there's two different things here, right? One is exponential opportunities if you move fast, which I 100% agree with. But the other part of winner take all, I will disagree and let's see who's right over the next little while.

Well, we will see. It's going to play out over the next two to four years. I mean, why do you think the entire AI leadership of our nation and the financial leadership of our nation showed up in Saudi Arabia for a week? Everybody, not just a few people. There was a significant enough meeting and a significant enough purpose of that meeting to say you had to be there.

And I think this was, I think we'll draw a line from last week to consequences that will be dominant for decades. Yeah, I mean, I cannot tell you how unnatural an act it is for a Saudi Arabian to wake up one morning and invest in Corweave or Cerebrus.

like that that doesn't happen you know i was like what because we have nearby no no no there's there's clearly like a really intentional and intelligent awareness of where the bottlenecks are and and those investments are turning out to be brilliant by the way but like chip design saudi what's the connection there well the connection there is that's the bottleneck to self-improving ai um we can go on about this you know when i was meeting when i was meeting with uh minister abdullah swaha

You know, he said something which really stuck with me. He says every week I have a meeting with MBS to talk about AI. It is his number one item on his agenda and it should be. I mean, it drives me nuts that it's not the number one item on every senator and congressman's agenda here and how it impacts health and how it picks education, education.

It's so transformative. All right. Let's go to this news clip from Mark Andreessen on Google and OpenAI visions. Let's take a listen to Mark. Kind of a little company, kind of big company thing. And I think that's repeating itself. And I think one of the ways to think about what's happening right now is OpenAI is kind of growing up to become Google and Google's kind of reinventing itself to be OpenAI. And so there's like a similar thing there.

I think that's fascinating, right? So OpenAI is going into the search business and wants to dominate. And of course, Google's been in the search business and it really needs to go Gemini first for this next few years.

That's true, huh? What do you think about that, Salim? I think it's very eloquent, as usual, for Mark. The thing that I find fascinating is Gemini is probably the best model out there for general use, and yet OpenAI just continues to soar in adoption. Yeah, it's like when my middle schoolers are like,

All they talk about is chat and open AI. It's like, seriously, they've captured open AI. And let's talk about the relative value. So we have Google at $2 trillion and open AI at $300 billion, just $300 billion. Dave, how do you think about the relative value there? Well, I mean, NVIDIA at $3.3 trillion today. So NVIDIA is almost 2x Google all of a sudden. Oh, my God. That's crazy. Yeah, and I tell you, there's some real interesting quandaries in there because Google –

You know, Google is losing search. There's no doubt about it. You can only debate the rate, but it's moving. And then Google's in a good position to capture a lot of that, but at much lower value per impression. So it really cannibalizes their revenue machine. On the other hand, YouTube and video content are killing it. And they benefit tremendously from synthetic video creation and also ad optimization using AI.

And so those tailwinds are very strong for Google. So you got the core dying at the same time the new things are growing like crazy. Then within GCP, the Google's cloud, they have the TPU7, the new TPUs that have this incredible weight stationary systolic array design, which allows them to be much more efficient than NVIDIA at running these core AI processes. I could go on for hours about it, but I'm telling you, this is the future of AI chips.

And they've got it, and they've got it ahead of the curve. And so it's going to be completely sold out, and they're going to redirect it into GCP and use it within their own internal use cases.

And I don't know that it'll ever end up not being sold out before they can even manufacture it. So then you're like, okay, NVIDIA is in a race with Google over who controls the AI chip stack that no one's even talking about yet. And it's all bottlenecked at what's TSMC willing to make for who and why. And Elon Musk now has a huge voice in that because he's part of the – it's like a – this is going to be the best TV series ever. I was going to say, it's soap opera, baby. It's Silicon Valley soap opera. Yeah.

And of course, the whole the whole Taiwan China of it all puts this incredibly crazy. You know, so what is China said they want to own Taiwan by 2028? Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. And I think the federal estimate they don't talk about it much is that you have to make the assumption that no access to chips from Taiwan by December 2027, which is nowhere near enough time to get the U.S. fabs up and running. So how's that going to play out?

they tell us you know 100 for sure that if china takes taiwan the fabs won't be operating for china yeah they will blow they will destroy them they'll shut them down yeah all right let's go to our next uh our next article here

This one does my heart well, having been in the pharma-related industry. So FDA announces completion of first AI-assisted scientific review pilot, an aggressive agency-wide AI rollout. So here's the FDA commissioner, Martin Makary. FDA is rolling out a GenAI tool across all centers by June 30th to speed up scientific review for new therapies.

I mean, one of the incredibly crazy hardships of our world is what's the problem with the development of new drugs? It's the regulatory slowdown. You know, it's the fact that we take sometimes years to make it happen. And the FDA, you know, an FDA employee who approves a drug that then

has, you know, kills some patients, has disastrous results. But what we don't do is we don't value all the lives lost for not approving a drug, right? It's just a flip situation. This is the safety versus efficacy problem, which is structural here. But I think the fact that they're using AI for a bunch of stuff is amazing. I think it's a great

I think it's the beginning. I mean, we should be rolling this out across all agencies. And we've discussed this before, right? So AI can help streamline all agencies and all approval processes. And it's going to be crazy. You know, in the future, people are going to look back and say, really? Humans did this? Seriously? How long did it take? Like decades? Yeah, it took decades.

Yeah, I'm looking for the administration to make real structural change that lasts beyond just one administration. And I think one of the greatest assets we have as a country is 50 different states that can try 50 different ideas so that if you're stuck somewhere, you can try somewhere else. And we're way under utilizing that core strength that we have.

So one of the best things you can do is say, look, let's let's push, let's deregulate like crazy and push a lot of this into 50 different shots on goal. Even if we make mistakes, we'll be far better off as a country if we have chances for entrepreneurs to move forward.

in many different places. You're spot on there, Dave. And here's an example. For the last decade, the FDA under previous administrations were shutting down all stem cell clinics in the US. And so what happened was if you wanted access to stem cells or a sort of an advanced experimental therapy, you would leave the US. You'd go to the Caribbean, you'd go to Mexico, you'd go to Costa Rica, Panama for these treatments.

And the problem is you're in a location that doesn't have advanced medical capabilities if something goes wrong. Well, this year, in fact, this month, we're about to see new regulation in Florida. Specifically, I know this because Fountain Life has...

two centers, soon three centers in Florida. And Florida is about to pass legislation allowing for stem cell treatments to occur in-state. So you're going to have the data finally, and people are able to stay there, be near their physicians, take the treatments, collect the data accurately, and then learn. All right, let's move on to our next question.

uh subject here and this one's on coreweave dave lead us here read the article and let's talk about it well we talked about this being a bellwether for the whole ipo market opening up again and uh

I think Corweave is above 70 bucks now, which is great. It's up 40, 50 percent from the IPO price. And so so far, the investors are all happy. I'm sure the iBanks all over Wall Street are saying, hey, we're open for business. So for those who don't know, talk to us about what Corweave does.

So CoreWeave, it's a bellwether for AI. It's a data center company. The thing that makes it a little weird to people is they borrowed a huge amount of money. They have an enormous amount of debt, which they use to buy NVIDIA chips. One of their investors is NVIDIA. They finance the data centers with the value of the chips. And the reason that's controversial is because nobody knows how quickly they'll depreciate. I think the current logic is we're going to be compute bound for years. Like everything that can compute is going to be in incredible demand forever.

in my opinion, forever hereafter for humanity. We'll look at this early wave of sort of, you know, computation from 1970 to 2020 as kind of the test ground where sometimes we use the chips, a lot of time they're lying all over our office here not processing anything.

But starting around now and forever hereafter, they're all going to be doing AI all the time. So anything that can compute is going to be in huge demand. And so I think that, you know, CoreWeave will go up in value if that theory is true.

Computronium, baby. Computronium. For those who haven't read enough science fiction, aren't science fiction geeks, computronium is what AI eventually turns all matter in the universe into. So compute all the time everywhere. The article here from CNBC says Corwee beats on revenue, reports more than 400% growth in the first earnings after the IPO.

So we've been waiting for some, you know, red hot IPOs to move the financial markets really to break open the logjam because we haven't had many companies going public or even that many acquisitions. So for the venture business, Dave, as the head of our partnership with Link XPV, this is amazing news.

It is amazing news. And it was also, the companies that are in the pipeline behind this are much less risky. So I was worried about this being the bellwether because, you know, it should go up, but it'd be with all that debt. You know, if it goes bad, it goes really bad. And that would shut down the markets again. So I'm really glad to see it went well. But the ones that are in the pipeline, they're almost all either chip companies or vertical use case companies. And they just can't. They're so low risk, such high return. Yeah.

So this is good. Once the pipeline fills up and we have five, six, seven more IPOs, then I think the train will be rolling. I hope so. All right. Here's another one from Bloomberg. Next slide here. Microsoft layoffs hit coders hardest with AI costs on the rise. So engineers make 40%.

of the total layoffs as AI begins to take over parts of their work. Not a surprise. Dave, how do you think about this? Well, it's like right in my wheelhouse. So, you know, we've all been telling people for a long time now that almost any white collar coding or other job, it's not going to exist in 2030. And so there's a line between today and 2030 that

And very few people are doing enough planning to get ready for it. Just to be humane to your employee base, you should have some kind of plan in place. And I had some real frustrating conversations this week with a couple of our companies because they're all using Blitzy. Blitzy is supposed to be an opportunity to learn what long form, you know, an AI that writes three million lines of code in a single night is.

That is incredibly world changing. And then the reports I got back are, hey, it had some bugs. I'm like, oh, my God, you completely missed the point. Look at the rate of improvement. Look what it's going to do by the end of the year. Can you slow it down? I love Blitzy. It's one of our investments, full disclosure, and LinkXPV. But if you wanted to replicate another company, right? So one of the biggest challenges right now is the ability of AI to basically go in and replicate a SaaS business, right?

to just basically stand up competition. And so where would you bring Blitzy in to do something like that? So Blitzy, you know, in its current form, if you have any legacy code base, you know, 5, 10, 20 million lines of code and you say, hey, I want you to rebuild this entire product, make it faster, better and run on the cloud.

That's kind of their sweet spot right now. But that's not the real point. The real point, if you look three months, six months, nine months into the future, and the rate of improvement of the AI, not just to write code, but to build entire plans, like project plans, it's on this crazy, crazy upslope. And so then if you look just a few months into the future, then Blitzy can come in and say, well, look, here's Greenfield Opportunity. I've wanted to write

a piece of software that does something that's been burning a hole in my pocket for years, but it was too expensive. Can I do it now? Yeah, not only can you do it, you can do it in like a night or a week. You know, a lot of people right now use Salesforce.com or Outlook to do things that they've kind of bastardized to their actual use case, and it sort of works.

but it's not exactly what they wanted, but it's good enough. Now you can just vibe code or blitzy code your way to a perfect solution for exactly what you were really after originally. And so that creates this whole long tail of really, really good high quality software that does what you actually wanted. You know your kind of dream, Peter, of like I get on stage, I've got all this IT around me, I've got avatars I'm talking to.

Why am I talking to an IT person? Why can't I just talk to the AI? That is imminent. I mean, that's a good example of the kind of stuff you can suddenly build because the cost per line of code is down a thousand or a million X. And so that's what Blitzy is enabling. And

I just want to walk into a business meeting where I've got a presentation on my computer and have all the AV work. That's all I want. Our favorite joke there drops in, right? AI is easy, but AV is really hard. Courtesy of Brad Templeton. Something just struck me, Dave, as you're talking about this. This means we can finally retire all those old COBOL systems.

Yeah, yeah. No, this is I mean, I mean, the world runs on legacy COBOL that nobody wants to touch and nobody knows how to maintain. We can essentially rewrite those for the modern world. No, the CEO of State Street Bank was telling me that they have all the nav accounting for all the mutual funds in the country is done on PL1 code on mainframes. Why? It's like $300 million a year of maintenance for that tech stack.

Why? Well, because it's a billion dollars to rewrite it and I don't want to eat that cost in any given quarter. It'll kill my bonus. Wow. Well, you bring that billion dollars down by a factor of 10 or 100 and they're like, oh, now I'll do it easily because it fits within my bonus cycle. It's just that simple. That's exciting. You know, I'll just end on this particular article from Bloomberg here on AI.

You know, I used to like harangue my kids, like you got to learn to code, got to learn to code, got to learn to code. And, you know, now it's you need to learn to vibe code and you need to learn to think in a way that's concrete. You can describe to your AI. I mean, everybody's going to be a coder. Everyone's going to have this ability. And it's pretty extraordinary. Yeah, I'm so glad you said that because I'm working on a memo right now that I'm going to send out to all the CEOs saying,

that says, look, guys, be humane here. Some subset of your people are going to be masters of AI, and then another subset are going to get crushed. Come up with some plan for the people that are going to get crushed so that it's humane. And then for the people that are going to be masters of AI, free up half or two-thirds of their time so they can start the 10,000 hours of learning that they need to do to get on top of this wave. What you're doing right now by turning a blind eye to it is you're dooming all of them

By not giving the time to become masters of AI, not learn to use things like Blitzy and Cursor. Yes. Let them play. Let them play. Let them play, yeah. But you have to explicitly allow that. It's not going to happen naturally. You've got to have a plan. You know, in one of our clients, they had to lay off like a third of their call centers because they automated it all. And they gave them an internal one-year UBI contract.

and said, go do whatever you want for a year. Here's a chunk of money. Play. And the employees absolutely loved it. And something like 95% got a job very quickly. You know, I would say here's a year of UBI. Use it to come up with new business ideas that our company could utilize. I mean, that would have been equally good. The other point you made, I think, is really, really important. Because if anyone does choose to take our advice...

telling them to go play with cursor and do some vibe coding is not good enough that you have to get them into that new there's a new mindset related to creativity that allows you to to use the ai to do something productive that goes way beyond just vibe coding we haven't fully specified that skill set but we know it involves creativity we know it involves vision we know it involves knowing how to use the tools and what the tools do well and don't do well

uh but it's way beyond just saying hey guys play with cursor a little bit okay now you're an ai person so take it a step further buddy what would you recommend i i would say that we you know the three of us kind of specify what we're learning about that skill set who's succeeding who's failing and then codify it into actual programs like i suggest you use this product you do this training program you try and build this thing

And just put it out on a website or put it out in this podcast as a roadmap that they can follow. And the people who choose to follow it end up being masters of AI. It'll evolve over time, but it's not as hard. It's intimidating to everybody. No one's trying, even though it's not that hard, actually.

You know, what if we have a dedicated podcast episode just to that? I'd love that. We'll record one session. Peter, let's talk to Nick and the team about this. Sure, we'll do some homework. We'll just have one dedicated session running through and saying, here's how you...

Build your own future and envisioning and here's some tools and let's run through some sample use cases. You got a brand like a badge of honor. You know, it's like, you know, people love these alternate to a university badges of achievement. Yeah. We give it one of those. This reminds me of like when electricity was first entering the menu, you know, the factory ecosystems and people were were.

hesitant to bring in electrical systems and they would finally see a electrical motor running some part of a factory and they would learn from that then they'd put it into a different part of the factory very slow it's very slow yeah can I can I give a quick anecdote here of course the worst example of this

was in the 1600s when a Scottish guy discovered that the definitive cure for scurvy, which is a vitamin C deficiency disease, you lost your teeth, it was horrible, was eating lemons or oranges. So he figured that out.

And he tells the Navy, the British Navy, the British Navy refuses to believe him for 50 years that such a simple thing could do this thing. They then take 50 years to deploy throughout the Navy. They take 50 more years to go, oh, maybe we should tell the Merchant Navy. It takes the Merchant Navy another 50 years. And between known cure and full deployment was 264 years. Wow.

Okay. And 40% of sailors or thousands of sailors are dying every week. It's a testament to how bad we are as a human species. Oh, we humans are so screwed. Luckily, that's shrunk a lot. And most of that is down, I think, down to 17 years, most of it being longitudinal testing for known cure to disease. But I think this is the cultural challenge.

issues that we have in adapting to things. My biggest insight about human beings ever is they'd much rather be comfortable than happy. Wow. Sad. All right. This is a story from an intern at Blitzy this summer. So I'll lean on him. We'll learn a lot from that, but I'll lean on him to come up with this. Like, okay, he's high school, you know, coming into college and,

And so what's the perfect roadmap for staying ahead of this curve? From your perspective, we can weave that into our plan for. Fantastic. Let's do it. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life.

It's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. Most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have a

this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the U.S. today and

And we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning.

when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Found Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you,

please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, my

It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Our next story here is from NPR, which I guess still exists for the moment. I won't go into that, but the story is Family Show's AI video of slain victim,

as an impact statement, possible legal first. So what does this mean? AI was used to create a video of a victim speaking at his perpetrator sentencing. And it says slain victim, so I guess the victim is dead. For the first time, AI was used in a U.S. courtroom for a victim impact statement. Legal experts see this use of AI as powerful and ethically acceptable. Fascinating.

It's just fascinating to see how AI is going to play into different parts of our ecosystems, our regulatory and social worlds. Any comments on this? I'm surprised they allowed it also. That's a really forward thinking to allow that. But I guess it's the voice of the victim. And if you can simulate it to give some semblance of reality, why not?

Well, the why not is because the defense will then say, well, if you're using AI testimony, I'm going to produce AI. I mean, it's going to be like, wait, this is deep fake versus deep fake now. It's a very slippery slope. I assume in this case, it was, you know, the judge and everybody wanted the outcome to be, you know, it must have been pretty obvious. They were worried the jury wouldn't see it that way. So having the victim talk on their own behalf is going to get you the outcome that they want.

But again, that opens Pandora's box like crazy. All right. Dave, I would love if you would cover this one. So specialized AI systems deliver breakthrough results, domain adaptive pre-training, adaptive pre-training. What is this all about?

Well, preface this by saying one of the listeners last time posted, I love this podcast. It's amazing. It's just like the all-in podcast for geeks. Perfect. That's the highest compliment I think I've ever gotten. Except we're dealing with the real news that matters, right? This is the stuff that's impacting people.

our lives for the long run. So yeah, this is called domain adaptive pre-training. So the way this evolved is I was actually two weekends ago trying to design a circuit, a neural network circuit as usual. And I said, I wonder if Gemini is any good at designing circuits. And it was terrible. And so I talked to Alex Wisner-Gross, the high genius, our mutual high genius friend. And he said, hey, have you heard of this thing from NVIDIA?

They took an open source model, in this case Lama 2, this was a couple years ago, and they retrained it to be a circuit designer. And so I pulled up the paper and I'm looking at it and I was like, wow, let's try this thing. So apparently it's like an order of magnitude better at circuit design than the raw model is.

because it's been retrained to be a circuit designer on specific circuits. But the reason I wanted to bring it up is because in this particular case, the cost of training it to do that specific task dramatically better was only a 1% increase in the overall training cost.

And so this matters a lot to upcoming startups because the new LAMA4 model, the 2 trillion parameter model, is a massive, massive investment by Meta that is free, open source, here it is. And the tools to then retrain it to do things like drug discovery or self-driving or chip design or speak some obscure language, those tools are open source online. There's a whole cookbook in this paper.

on how you can do it yourself. And a lot of the companies that I look at, a lot of the teams, even the high school teams, they're afraid to retrain. They're just putting wrappers around the core models and they're using the models all day. You know, they're talking to either GPT or Gemini all day long, but it never occurs to them to go and retrain it and make it an order of magnitude better at some specific task.

So this really addresses, I don't know if you remember, their whole batch. So let me get this straight. So you take one of the generalized models, in this case LAMA, and then you give it a training set for that, a very specific niche use case. And then at very, very low cost, you get unbelievable outcome. That's exactly right. And I skipped one step in there where first you distill it.

Make it smaller, much faster. Don't lose any of its capability within your domain. But throw away a lot of the irrelevant capabilities because it's been trained on 15 trillion tokens, every language, every conceivable. And you're just trying to use it to either do math or to do chip design or to speak Swahili. And so there's a lot of overhead that you can strip out. So the distillation process can shrink it by a factor of 10 to 100, make it much faster, and then you can build it back up again with new data and

that's specific to that domain. So it's called Domain Adaptive Pre-Training. It makes total sense given what you're doing. And very, very few people are trying to do it, even though it's so straightforward. It's just a cookbook laid out for you by NVIDIA. Here's how you do it. And I did notice that after NVIDIA did this, they went completely dark and internal on it, which tells you how well it works. They're using it internally to grind new chips. So they said, holy crap, this is so good. We can't just throw this out there anymore. You know, it's just...

we don't know how many of these are out there, these hacks, these improvements. We're going to see one in a moment. Um,

Let's go there. In fact, this is an article that I read. I just thought it was extraordinary. It's news from DeepMind. Google DeepMind introduces Alpha Evolve, a coding agent for algorithm discovery. So here's what we learned from DeepMind, an alphabet company. So Alpha Evolve uses Gemini AI and evaluators to evolve high-performance code.

So in doing this, they were able to improve Gemini's training speed by 23%, which is massive, and improve GPU performance by 32.5%. So we're talking about new models.

that allow an AI to self-improve, to improve its own algorithms. I mean, we're seeing really the knee of the curve in this self-referential, self-improving AI future that really drives us in a super exponential towards digital superintelligence. I mean, it's all happening right here, right now.

Yeah, there's a cool video out of Sam Altman over at Sequoia's office last week. And one of the questions he got from the crowd is, hey, is coding just another capability within all the open AI capabilities that you're working on? Or is it somehow special and isolated and you work on it more? And he said, oh, no, it's definitely special. It's very, very special. It's special because...

We use it internally, and then he bites his tongue, and he says, let's move on to the next question. So I asked Alex Wisner-Gross about that, and he's like, yeah, that's the third time I've seen that.

The problem with talking about self-improvement inside these big foundation model companies is it attracts all the dystopians and then all the regulators come right after that. Yeah. But it's really obvious that the reason they care so much about this use case is because the thing is going to improve itself and that's going to accelerate the timeline. I mean, 32.5% GPU performance. And this is just like generation one of this thing, right? Yeah.

That's unbelievable. Yeah. It's not just, I mean, when I say it's a super exponential, you know, it really is. We've gone from 2x every two years to 10x a year to 100x a year to something beyond that in terms of the improvements that we're seeing. And it's not slowing down. I mean, there are no physical limits right now that we can see. Yeah.

Here's another one from Meta. Meta's FAIR shares new research to achieve advanced machine intelligence. So a number of things announced from Meta this week. Open Molecules 2025. It's a massive data set enabling breakthroughs in molecular discovery with large atomic system simulation. So I love this stuff. This is where we can discover new materials.

and we can discover new drugs and drug interactions. This is humans designing with atomic Lego sets. And then Universal Model for Atoms, another item, another model out of Meta. A foundational machine learning model for accurately predicting atomic interactions across diverse materials.

Again, you know, Salim, you and I have discussed this material sciences as at the fundamental core of everything. Material sciences is going to drive energy. It's going to drive environmental breakthrough. It's going to drive space exploration. It's going to drive all of these things.

There's this amazing thing of going from atoms to bits, right? And then once you can use bits to then affect atoms, you end up with this incredible feedback loop. And if we can actually manipulate the physical world with these advanced AI models, then holy moly.

Yeah, it's crazy. I don't know, did I tell you, Peter, Alexander Kiesling, you know, our frat brother, much younger, is now one of the top quantum computing guys in the country. And, you know, quantum computing is good for two things that we know of. One of them is cracking cryptography. Yes. But the other one is simulating biological systems. The hell were you guys doing in this frat? What in God's name? What was in the water? Yeah.

Actually, MIT has just become a ridiculous place since we were there. The concentration of entrepreneurs is just unbelievable today. So I'm not surprised. But I think that we should follow up on how that interacts with this because the AI gets faster and faster and faster, but it needs that simulator in order to keep it on track. And so if you can take the whole drug discovery thing or the whole molecule discovery thing

And then the simulator is actually quantum computer based. Well, this is what Jack Hittery is doing at Sandbox AQ, right? They're basically using super fast AI models to run quantum equations and being able to model things in a way that is understandable on a quantum basis, but doing it with conventional AI. And

I don't think we've seen anything yet coming out of quantum compared to what we're going to see over the next few years. I don't know if you've ever watched Three Blue, One Brown. Unbelievable videos on all things science, math, technical. It's just the most incredible explanations of everything. Like the transformer AI explanation is epically great. Would you text me that? I would love to probably watch with my boys. That would be great. Yeah. Yeah.

The quantum computing explanation, couldn't do it. It's just...

You cannot fathom quantum computing, what it does well and what it doesn't do well in an hour or two. Well, Salim, you want to share our favorite conversation about quantum computing? Sure. Ten years ago, Steve Jurvetson spoke at Singularity University, and we asked him in the Q&A, the amount of computation that these things can do is off the hook. Where is all this computation coming from? And he goes, well,

Well, we have a consensus answer amongst the top quantum physicists in the world, but you're not going to like it. We're like, what? Just tell us. And he's like, okay. It seems the current consensus is that we're doing the computation in parallel universes and bringing the answer back.

And at which point everybody's brains explode and we're like, okay, he goes, I told you you wouldn't like it. So that was like 10 years ago. By the way, it's still the consensus. Well, this is the point. Last year you had Helmut. Hartmut Nevin. Hartmut Nevin, the head of Google's quantum computing lab.

And I said to him in the Q&A, hey, Steve Jurvetson said this 10 years ago. Now we have 10 years more data experiments. Thousands of teams have been working on this. You know, what's the consensus? And he goes, you're not going to like it. But it's the same. And in fact, he said the existence of a quantum computer may be evidence that we're living in a multiverse. Okay.

And in which case, you know, everyone just goes, OK, come on. Before that scares everyone away, we really ought to get Kiesling on the pod for a little bit. But the reason there's lots and lots of hope and enthusiasm around this is because we're very close to an AI quantum compiler where you can just say, just like you do with Gemini, say, hey, here's something I want to do. Does it fit quantum or not?

And it'll actually tell you and also then compile what you're saying into the actual quantum code. And so then the usability for a startup or for just a weekend hacker, and also the quantum computers are on the cloud. It's not like you need to go and get some atoms in your base. It's just another login on the cloud. So it's really pretty practical and exciting and coming soon. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin.

The truth is I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time.

If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. You know, I'm always looking for tipping points. When do we know things are hitting an inflection point and accelerating and things are changing?

And this article in The New York Times is one of them. So, quote, top priority from Pope Leo warned the world of the AI threat. So Pope Leo XIV warned that AI poses serious risk to human dignity, justice and labor and

and considers that AI must be developed, quote, for the good of all and calls for ethical use. And it's not his commentary, but the fact that this is a New York Times article and that the Pope is focusing on AI in the first month of his, you know, papal leadership, if that's the right terminology. So it's pretty extraordinary, right?

Yeah, I think it's great because, you know, there's a billion Catholics all over the world, including my wife, and the underreaction is rampant. And when you get somebody as renowned as the Pope saying, okay, here are the priorities, it's very similar to experience a much smaller scale. But Joe Aoun, the president of Northeastern in the commencement address last year said, yeah.

AI will affect every one of you no matter what you majored in. You must do AI. And he's the only university president I heard say that. And it's like, wow, thank God. So now you've got, well, thank God again, you've got the Pope giving you the heads up that this is coming. And hopefully that'll create some motion. It's great to see them getting in front of this, you know, as opposed to waiting 300 years to acknowledge the Earth goes around the sun.

This is at least much more. And I've got to admit, the couple of times I've been to the Vatican the last few years, Peter, you've been there a couple of times as well, is they've been way, way more up to speed with what's happening in technology than I ever would have given them credit for. Yeah, we had sessions on regenerative medicine and longevity there. And I was pretty impressed the topics were allowed. But I think it's going to be interesting if an

AI claims to be conscious, right? And does it have a soul? See what the reaction is then. Yeah. Maybe they'll let women to actually become priests someday, and then AIs will follow after that. We'll see. Well, just another note on this was, you know, the last pope had this defining quality, which was tenderness.

One of the most extraordinary, humble, wonderful men you could ever meet. And usually when they voted a new pope, they go the other way. And it's amazing to see them continuing the same path in this new pope. So it's great to see. By the way, one of the most extraordinary things you can do with the large language models is take very dense and complicated information like the Bible and make it understandable to you.

You know and the end the Bible and the Bible is in every large language model out there in detail So, I mean talk about Bible study. I think there's no better Bible study than a conversation with your favorite Can I give you the retro version of this? Sure in the 1500s. There was a Swedish monk. He was called Sweden Bork Okay, okay, honey, and he was a psychic

And what he did was he basically decided that the Bible is a set of coded rules, and you had to kind of apply these filters. So one of the rules that he applied was any verse that has water in it is truth.

Any verse that has fire in it is false, and you should just check it out. And he basically rewrote the Bible based on these rules that he divined. And when you read the resulting text, it's unbelievably beautiful. So this is like a new version of that, I think, applied when we say AI can help us interpret some of this stuff.

Amazing. All right, let's let's turn to other exponential news beyond AI. This is a story that I love. This came out from Archer, Archer Aviation. I've had them on my stage at the Abundance Summit event.

Archer is the new official air taxi provider for L.A. 28 Olympics. And here is the tweet. We're extremely proud to announce that Archer is the official air taxi provider for the L.A. 28 Olympics and the Paralympic Games and Team USA. So I've been saying this for a bit now. That is the target deadline. So Archer is beginning operation. It's built manufacturing plants. We also have in the U.S.,

Joby Aviation, and we have Beta. These are sort of the flying cars. And I've had this

conversation. They're officially called EVTOLs, electric vertical takeoff or landing. And that name just rolls off the tongue and hits the floor. Uh, I think, uh, flying taxis or flying cars is, is better. And the 28 Olympics is when, uh, manufacturing operations, FAA regulations all need to be in place. You know, I fly my airplane out of Santa Monica airport here, uh,

which the runway has been shortened from 5,000 feet to 3,000 feet. Eventually, it's supposed to be closed down in 2028. And hopefully, what will happen is it will become a vertiport for these to take off and land. So if I want to go to, you know, Malibu or want to go to a Dodger game downtown LA or Santa Barbara, I can hop in and avoid the 405, which is like, you know, hell on earth.

If there was one breakthrough I've been waiting for forever and a day, it's this one. Because this will open up and enable so many things. Just consider how many amazing little plots of land are high up on the side of a mountain that you can't get to, right? And now become accessible. Huge geographic arbitrage, right? Massive. I've talked about, you know, go buy island real estate off the coast.

that doesn't have easy access but is beautiful and just set up eVTOL service. A lot of islands out here on the East Coast, Peter. Say again? A lot of really nice islands out here. Actually, I look at a bunch of them every day. All right, well, let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah, I think the barrier is safety, obviously, but the safety... Each of those electric motors is completely independent and...

So the power safety is going to be, I think, pretty doable. And then the air-to-air, like it's all AI-controlled. Yeah, I think it's more infrastructure because you need specialized gates, you need specialized facilities to deal with this, all that stuff. But the safety is definitely, I think I'd feel safe even landing at Newark with one of these right now. I think my real point there is there are absolutely no barriers to this and it's all regulatory. So having this forcing function deadline is...

is going to put the manpower on it. Once the people are working on it, it's going to happen. It's really exciting, actually, to have a deadline. It is. I mean, it's the number one driver, I think, and super excited to hear this announcement. I spent two hours yesterday trying to get home from Kennedy Airport and two hours last week trying to get to Sao Paulo Airport. So God help us get this thing going faster. The alternative is helicopters, which are damn dangerous. Yeah. They truly are. All right, let's move on.

The next subject here is longevity, one of my favorite subjects. I want to hit on a couple of articles and subjects here. Dave, you were there. Salim, you were someplace on Earth, even though you're a director of the XPRIZE Foundation. So the big news here is in November 2023 in Riyadh, once again, this is

Saudi Arabia putting their money behind advancements. We announced the $101 million HealthSpan XPRIZE. This is an XPRIZE directed at trying to add a minimum of 10 years of

goal of 20 years of additional health in immune cognition and muscle. And for the first time, what we're doing is we're providing milestone awards to help teams make progress. We've had 623 teams

register for this XPRIZE. Super proud of that. And last week, Dave and I, you and I were sitting together. We awarded 40 of the teams with $250,000 totaling 10 million in this milestone one award ceremony. And pretty amazing teams. I think we had winners from 12, 14 countries from Australia to China, throughout Europe, the US, much of Asia.

What do you think of it, Dave? Well, right out of the gate, it's amazing how you've, you know, the original XPRIZE that you conceived of was trivial to measure compared to what you're doing now. Yeah. But the impact of this is so incredibly massive. So in terms of the XPRIZE overall mission, it's just the best idea ever.

To try and make it a measurable, manageable prize must have been incredibly hard. And so congratulations on that. This is clearly working. Thank you. I got to pass the congrats on to my partner in crime, Dr. Jamie Justice, who is the executive director of this competition.

Yanni Psaltis helped me find her and she's been running it, working with an incredible scientific advisory board. Mahmoud Khan, the CEO of Hevolution, which think of it as health and evolution.

I'm invested in a whole bunch of different technologies here and I advise different companies. So I am, you know, conflict incarnate, but I'm outside. Just be clear. I'm not involved in any team selections, any team judging. I'm a bystander watching and rooting for a winner here sooner rather than later. I think it's awesome. This is the biggest public prize ever given in the history of humanity.

yeah right it is it's uh and this is just compared to elon we just awarded elon's 100 million dollar prize and this one's 101 million dollar price specifically so who would be bigger than elon's x prize yeah the other thing that jumped out at me on monday uh down in new york is the the original x prize uh 10 million dollar prize and i think maybe 100 million dollars of effort to win the 10 million dollars yes it was a 10x return yeah

So then the carbon removal prize was kind of the opposite of that huge prize from Elon Musk's coffers, and somebody actually made a lot of money on it. This one is back to the original mission, which is as a force multiplier, $101 million prize. The number on stage was some massive amount of effort.

has gone in to winning these stages. I think it's the exact number. 30X is the overall leverage that the prizes are delivering now, right? Yeah. 30X. So we've launched about $550 million of prize purses, and we're close to $10 billion in R&D spent cumulatively by all the teams over the last 30 years to do this.

And it's a great idea. And if you go to XPRIZE.org, folks can see about all the XPRIZEs. One of my favorite ones as well going on right now is the Wildfire Prize. I did a Moonshots podcast with Palmer Luckey, which was super fun. The CEO of Anduril and Palmer was the first person to register in this Wildfire Prize. I've seen his technology going after it. And it's amazing. Super excited for that.

All right, let's go to a related article on longevity. A lot of people are concerned that if we extend the human health span, so in the United States, average life expectancy, how long your heart is ticking is about 79 years old, is when the average age of death. Average health expectancy, how long you're healthy is 63. So there's this 16-year gap between

between when you stop being healthy and when you die and it's just miserable for a multitude of reasons. And so people say, well, if you extend the health span and lifespan to 100, 120, aren't we going to have an overpopulation issue? Well, it's just the opposite. So I use this article to bring this conversation to us. Turkey declares 2025 as the year of family to curb declining birth rates.

So this article just popped out in 2024. The birth rate in Turkey was 1.48 children per family. You need 2.1 children to replace your existing population. But, you know, Turkey is doing pretty well compared to other countries. So I went and used my favorite LLMs to come up with who are the top 10 lowest birth rate countries.

and they're not you know insignificant countries so check this out south korea has 0.72 children per woman south korea is sublimating it's vaporizing it's going away right hong kong 0.8 palau 0.8 singapore 0.9 puerto rico 0.9 taiwan 1.1 china 1.16 spain 1.19 italy 1.2 ukraine 1.22 children per family

It's a problem. You know, Elon's been very vocal about this. I have as well. The biggest issue is not overpopulation, right? The old population bomb theory isn't playing out. As we create, as we create increased abundance, the opposite is true. It's, it's a underpopulation issue. Yeah. I mean, the South Korea one is nuts. It's saying that the birth rate is three times less than it needs to be.

Yeah, to maintain the population size. Yeah, it's really ridiculous. What does the country do? It starts offering massive benefits for incentives, having children. Dave, any thoughts on this?

Yeah, I've read up on the incentives and they're not even close to covering the cost of raising a child. No one's reacting to the incentives. So I also haven't modeled out how the declining birth rate and the increasing longevity, you know, is there a dip and then a climb or is it smooth? And would it be worth trying to it's hard to predict the longevity curve, but it'd be worth trying to map that out. But one thing I can say is there's a perception in the U.S. that

that china's trying to beat us in ai and china's trying to take over the world and china's going to use it but actually what's what's driving china's incredibly fast push into ai and robotics is a ridiculous demographic time bomb that hit japan and they have the exact same problem times much worse coming in china it's survival it's fundamental survival

By the way, the other side of the equation is India, right, with 1.41 billion people, the majority of which are an absolute, you know, bottom of the pyramid. They need AI and robotics for education, for health care. They can't survive as a nation without this.

Are you seeing that, Salim? I have to go a bit tongue-in-cheek on this. I was in India and I introduced two random people together and they knew five people in common. Then I introduced two other random people together and they knew 10 people in common. And I'm convinced that India has like 50,000 people and CGI to simulate a one and a half billion. It's like everybody knows everybody. It's insane. I've not lived in Bombay since I was 10 years old and I can go to a party and I will know five people.

And it's ridiculous. Anyway, but the broader point I think is dead on that the opportunity for robotics for elderly care and education and health care in general, there's such so little of it.

It's like water in a desert. Any little thing is going to totally change the landscape. And I'm super excited by the potential there. You know, Machining Robotics, your folks think it's incredible. It's a good segue into Elon updates. But one of the things I'm excited about in the direction things are going, you know, globalization is kind of falling apart.

uh in a big way actually but globalization was almost entirely driven by cheap labor now with the direction things are going you know robotics doesn't happen naturally in the u.s because you can always do something very cheaply with philippine or indian labor but if if that becomes less true then we have to invest in robotics which in the long run is a much much smarter direction for the world to go

And so that should kickstart investment in the category because the technology, you know, the vision systems, the tactile systems, all of that is solved now. Let's put the numbers on the table here. Minimum wage in California today is $20 an hour. The projection I was just with Cyrus Sigiri, we do a monthly exponential survey.

mastermind for the abundance members and Cyrus gave one yesterday on humanoid robotics and flying cars and spaceships and we're talking about this. The projected price per hour for operating a humanoid robot

is going to be a dollar an hour. At a base cost, it's 40 cents an hour, but at maintenance and electricity and everything else on insurance, it's a buck an hour. And this arbitrage between a dollar an hour for a GPT-5 level, Grok 4 level humanoid robot that operates 24-7 compared to a teenager from California, there's just no comparison. Ain't going to happen.

Until the robots become conscious and start demanding equal rights and equal pay. Well, it's like if we have robots doing all of our drudgery work, they're not going to be happy about that. Let's go on. We actually added a special section this week on Elon company updates because there's a lot of them.

And we'll wrap up with this segment today. But I think it's important. You know, Elon still is our, you know, moonshot, our moonshot mate, just really driving extraordinary progress and how he does this while everything else he does. Right. He's in Doge in the news all the time, but still he's operating four other, you know, crazy moonshot companies, five if you want to

Yeah, five. All right. So let's talk about three of them here. The first is Elon in Saudi Arabia. He was by Trump's side the entire time. Let's listen to a conversation about Elon announcing robo taxis and Starlink in Saudi Arabia. Here we go. My prediction actually for humanoid robots is that ultimately there will be

tens of billions. Potentially, we could have an economy 10 times the size of the current global economy where no one wants for anything. You know, sometimes in AI, they talk about universal basic income. I think it's actually going to be universal high income.

where anyone can have any goods or services that they want. So it would be very exciting to have autonomous vehicles here in the Kingdom. I'd also like to thank the Kingdom for approving Starlink for maritime and aviation use. So there he is with Minister Abdul Azawah, who has been sort of a key point of contact

making sort of announcements on robotics. I'm going to be amazed if we don't see Optimus manufactured in Saudi Arabia as well. Here's the next article.

SpaceX deploys 28 additional satellites. Now there are 7,135 Starlink satellites in orbit. The FCC has approved 12,000 of the Gen 1 and 7,500 of the Gen 2. But SpaceX has proposed expanding the constellation to 42,000 satellites. That's either 42 because of, you know, Douglas Adams, or it's 4,200 because like Elon likes 420 satellites.

I don't know, but hey. Let's pause there. What do you guys think about Elon's companies in Saudi? Well, I mean, Elon, like you said, his ability to manage five concurrent mega companies plus Doge. It's a case study and a role model for how you use one AI assistance and then two integrators. You know, people who are incredibly like-minded, finish your own sentences, but are entirely focused on operations. Very similar to Google in the early days.

And so I try and encourage everyone I bump into to study Elon very, very closely, like at the individual actions level and take the part you want to take, but replicate a lot of it. And it clearly is a path to success. The part I love is where he every week he has, what, five companies. So he goes one day a week to each one and says, what problem do you need me to help solve? And then so you're solving a problem a week, 50 problems a year per company. Amazing.

What do you guys predict?

And I tweeted, I don't know, a couple weeks ago that the value of Tesla is not in the car sales. It's in the robo taxi and an optimist, which are, you know, trillion dollar opportunities.

How do you guys feel about Tesla stock? To me, this one's really, really obvious. So, you know, we all lived through the Apple cycle where Apple was the greatest company and enabled us like crazy. Then Apple products didn't work at all. And it was torture. Like our actual daily lives turned into this hell of needing to migrate to Sun or to a PC. And then Steve Jobs came back and magically life is great again.

It's a very real thing. But you just have to track the talent. So if Steve Jobs comes back, it's not Steve alone. He brings this incredible wave of talent. And inspiration. And inspiration, yeah. Yeah. So if Elon can attract that talent to Tesla still, it'll become a great robotics company. It's cheap. If you look at LinkedIn and you see that Elon's so distracted he's not working on the recruiting, then it's a car company.

So, yes, I've, you know, in the early years of Tesla, when he was about to run out of money every quarter, it was like hard to put money into it. And so lots of us didn't put money into it.

And then earlier as a SpaceX, the rockets were crashing. So you didn't put money into it. Earlier as a Starlink, you're like, how is this going to work? And so the lesson that people have learned over the years is don't ever bet against Elon. His manic focus, his engineering ability, his ability to distill key problems and just go after them and solve them. The cluster approach they use at a grok to solve the

This is like legendary stuff that's going to go down for centuries in terms of somebody making massive turning points. So I think the opportunity for Tesla to totally turn it around with robo-taxis, but also note that all these million cars are carrying around energy.

Yes.

that will never be lower than it is now. Yeah, I agree with you. So when we think about Elon's companies, we think about SpaceX, of course, and Tesla, and X and XAI, and Neuralink. And people forget about the fact that he still has the boring company. I remember a tweet-

What's that? But a neural link. But I mentioned neural link. Yes. But I remember the tweet. You know, he's he's going from Hawthorne to Beverly Hills to his home. He's going from SpaceX headquarters to his home. And like, you know, the 405 is jammed and he goes, this is insane. There needs to be a better way. And he tweets, you know, I'm going to I'm going to start tunneling under L.A.,

And that's him, right? When he has a crazy idea, he goes, yep, that's what I'm going to do. It's going to be a boring company. I'll call it the boring company. But let's watch this video. For the first time ever, the boring company has continuously mined in a zero people in tunnel configuration. There's no one in the machine which is simultaneously advancing forward and erecting a ring. In other words, building a tunnel behind it.

Each full ring weighs 24,000 pounds. So you can see here in this video basically a completely automated process of drilling, extracting the earth and building a tunnel behind.

I was, you know, in my conversations with Palmer Lucky, Palmer was saying that while we are, you know, we have a space force, an air force, an army, that eventually there will be an underground force as well as tunnel technology gets more advanced. An underground force. Yeah, crazy. I think the Boring Company has the greatest name for a company in history. I agree.

So that's the articles for this week. Pretty intense, guys. I can't wait for us to get together again. If you've been watching,

this episode of Moonshots and WTF Just Happened in Tech. Our mission here is deliver to you and contextualize the most important news in the tech world that's impacting every company, every industry, every parent, every aspect of our lives. Please subscribe. Give us your feedback. Tell us what articles you enjoyed listening to, what you want to listen to next.

uh, tell me, you know, do you like Dave better or Salim better now? And, uh, and who else would you like on this podcast? Yes. Can I do a small plug? Yeah, of course. We did an EXO workshop last year for a hundred bucks. It's sold out. People said it was one of the best workshops they ever had. We're doing another one on May 20th. So anybody interested in what's being covered in that workshop on May 20th, which is my birthday, by the way. Um,

It's how do you build an EXO? So Peter, you should drop in for 30 seconds. Say happy. So we can say happy birthday to you. I'll get you the details, but we cover how do you build an EXO? And people loved it. So we're going to just keep doing that every month, roughly a last one sold out. So it'll be great. I

Amazing. And EXO is an exponential organization that's performing 10x compared to your competition. Salim and I have written an extraordinary book on the subject. Check it out. But more importantly, go sign up for Salim's workshop. We'll put it in the notes below. But where do people go to? Just go to OpenEXO.com. You'll see a link to it, but we'll put a link in the notes. Dave, what are you excited about for the coming weeks and months?

Well, that comment in the last week's podcast about, hey, the geeky version of all in. I really if people are commenting on this podcast to entertaining you. Sure, that's that's fine. But we really actually want to do things and say things that help you map out your life and change your direction. And so if you're suggesting guests or suggesting topics or whatever, and, you know, keep it actionable and really be honest with yourself. Like, did anything I heard here today change?

impact the way I'm going to spend the next week. And so we can really focus on those things because this is the only podcast I know of where we cover not just the technical aspects, but also the societal, the macroeconomic, and

I don't know of any other place that does that well. So if we can keep bringing in more of that to this, this can become the kind of forum for...

And please know that between Salim, Dave, myself, and our entire research teams, we're scouting everything that's going on in humanoid robotics, in space, in AI, in Bitcoin, in 3D printing, and we're doing the work. It's why I'm bold.

But beautiful. And we have a lot of resources, too. If there's a complicated topic that you really want to understand, we can either figure it out or farm it out and then bring it back to you. Yeah. Anyway, give us your feedback. We love doing this. And guys, I love having you as my moonshot mates. See you guys soon.

Take care, guys. Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at dmandis.com slash subscribe. That's

That's dmatnus.com slash subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots.